Her critics echoed the familiar themes. Her kids can’t possibly be happy or truly creative. They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without the audacity to be great. She’s destroying their love for music. There’s a reason Asian-American women between the ages of 15 and 24 have such high suicide rates.
I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.
Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group ”” these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
Absolutely, the difficulty lies in managing real humans, not the duress of prolonged academia or instrumental work. This is the true work of young people, not only academic work and other activities, but building friendships and a work life.
Actually, I agree. Academics will only get you into and through the first two years of medical school. After that, it is critical to be able to win confindence, engage trust, build relationships, understand when you are being sabotaged etc. The second two years or medical school (on the wards) and during residency is when Asians tend to fall behind their smooth talking, laid back, vastly less hardworking and knowledgeable, white collegues.
When this happens (which is fairly often) many Asians consider this “racism”. It isn’t. Getting people to work in a team, managing various types and conditions of people, understanding what makes them tick, making friends are all necessary skills. The fact that ostensibly it is all about “how much you know and how hard you work” rather than how well you get along with people, does not change the fact that people work in teams. It is much better to have a smooth running team of B athletes than a poorly functioning team with a single A athleted. Further, the fact that these skills were never publically announced or advertised as necessary skills does not make them less necessary. This is the point at which many Asians are (unfairly) categorized as “abrasive” or “arrogant”. (They aren’t). They simply never learned how to do small talk. They never got the hand of chatting on minor topics of conversation (tv shows, football, dresses, shoes etc). There was never any time for it.
So I do agree with the author. Both are important. Especially in America.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_are_not_su.html
The last psychiatrist has an interesting take on Chau.